Snapchat employee fell for phishing scam

A Snapchat employee fell for a phishing scam last week, compromising the identity information of other existing and ex-employees.

A Snapchat payroll employee opened the wrong email last week to damaging consequences.

The message was a phishing scam that impersonated Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel.

In the email, a hacker posing as Spiegel requested payroll information for existing and ex-employees. The hacker then exposed that information to the outside world.

Snapchat issued a public apology to its workers in a blog post on Sunday.

The incident took place on Friday, according to the post. Within four hours, the startup confirmed that it was an “isolated” problem and reported it to the FBI.

Luckily, no servers were breached. No user data was taken. But “a number of our employees have now had their identity compromised. And for that, we’re just impossibly sorry,” Snapchat says.

The startup has contacted all of the employees who were impacted by the scam, and offered them offered two years of identity-theft monitoring and insurance. Snapchat says it has strengthened its training programs too.

Phishing scams like this one are simple by design — a malicious actor pretending to be a trusted source. But its effects can be disastrous and complicated, as the Sony hack proved. All it takes is duping the one person who has all the right keys.

The way that Snapchat secures information has been of public interest since 2013, when the app started to gain massive popularity.

At the end of that year, cybersecurity researchers warned the company that hackers could find a way to expose people’s identities by linking phone numbers with user names.